by Alex Austin
Staring at the heavens, he caught his breath at the tender touch of the stars, as if each was a woman’s loving finger.
Chapter 18
At the Peace & Love Café, the patio was empty except for the poet, an older denim-clad man who sat on his bench, rocked and muttered a mantra as he awaited customers. He sold his poems ten-for-a-dollar, but Hugh, like most of the regulars, refused to purchase, fearing it would become the expected gesture, so most of the poet’s customers were strangers, visitors. Occasionally, Hugh would place a dollar on the deck where the poet could find it, not suspecting that it came from Hugh, perhaps thinking God was a fan of his poems—and that was their amiable relationship. Hugh nodded to the ever-nodding poet, took the table under the dollar tree and plugged his laptop into the extension cord that ran out of the café. The blue power light didn’t come on. He checked all the connections, but the light remained off. The battery wouldn’t last more than an hour. He followed the extension cord into the café where it led to an outlet beneath the table of a customer whose back was to Hugh. He peered under the customer’s legs. The plug had fallen from the outlet.
“Excuse me,” said Hugh, tapping the man’s shoulder.
Twisting in his chair, Kyle glared back.
“I need to plug in,” said Hugh.
As he had done at the beach, Kyle smirked and looked past Hugh as if to share some comedy with a friend.
“I’m using this outlet,” said Kyle.
“No, it’s empty.”
Kyle pushed aside his chair and rose, backing Hugh to the window. Kyle stayed with him like a dance partner. The man’s hot skin radiated through his tattered T-shirt, which smelled of dried perspiration and tobacco. Hugh went soft under the man’s weight, like a dog that bellies up to avoid a fight, but Kyle wasn’t letting him off that easy. Hugh prepared for a head butt.
“What’s she see in an old man like you?” asked Kyle.
“Nothing. And there is nothing.”
“I smell her on you.”
“Do you mind if I plug in?”
“What is it, old man?”
The café had grown quiet.
“What the fuck you got on her?” asked Kyle.
“Just let me plug—”
“I thought we were beyond this stuff,” said Melinda, the tarot card reader.
“Hey, you guys, take it outside,” said Rick.
“You paying her?” asked Kyle.
“No, son.”
“Not your son, asshole.”
“Right you are.”
Simone, the café’s owner, walked up. “This will stop.”
Kyle grinned at Simone. “Just messing around.”
Hugh nodded. “It was nothing, Simone.”
“I hope so,” said Simone, shaking her head and walking back to the counter where a customer waited. “C’est toujours le même refrain,” she sniffed.
Kyle stepped aside, allowing Hugh to bend down and insert the plug. Kyle wouldn’t jeopardize his day job.
“See you later,” said Kyle, as Hugh pushed through the screen door.
It was a mistake to feed her, to let her stay, to leave her sleeping in his bed.
But those regrets shriveled as the desktop icons appeared. Keywords: 2000, Oceanside, boat. He thought the craft to be the size of a sport fishing boat, which was how large? Several times, he’d taken the boys on a party boat out of San Pedro. He typed in “sport fishing, San Pedro.” The fleet of sport fishing boats came up, one of which was named the Sea Mist. Beneath photographs of the boat was a box of information. Length: fifty feet. So the length of the boat was about fifty feet, maybe a few feet more, or less.
His search produced fourteen million responses.
Christ. He would not find the boat, he thought dismally, and even if he found it, what then? What would he do?
Hugh slumped, weighted by the awareness of how ridiculous the search was. Next he would be attending séances. He would be like the woman he encountered at the Coffee Bean who had lost her dog. She searched her neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods for weeks, hired people off Craigslist to put up reward posters. In local papers and online, she devoured the descriptions of found pets. She haunted the pounds and animal shelters. At the café, she asked everyone she met, strangers even, for ideas on how to find her dog. Some buoyed her with suggestions, some just shook their heads. One day he heard her talking about a psychic and on a subsequent day she described the method the psychic suggested to get her pet to return home. Turn a spotlight on your house at night. Show your pet that you still love it. More than one person told her that certainly a coyote had gotten little Jack, but she rented a spotlight to illuminate her house and beckon home her pet.
A boat?
But Jaycee Dugard disappeared from the world at age eleven, the age of his sons, and was found eighteen years later. She could not have been alive and yet she was. How many thousands having lost someone took hope from this story? That the desert was not gnawing away at the bones of their children? This was what he hoped. This was the stupid thing. That somehow his sons had not died. That it had all been a big mistake. That he would wake up from the nightmare to find that he was not irrevocably separated from his sons as he knew he was, and knowing felt his heart plunge as if to the first harrowing drop on a roller coaster.
Hugh pushed back his chair. That he could find his answer through this plastic screen, that he could dig through the digital world and bring his sons back from the dead, that they were sitting on the bow of a boat waiting for him to find them—this was the idea that had stolen upon him. Wasn’t that the promise of this depthless vault of information? That everything could be retrieved—even the dead.
He needed more parameters. He needed to know more about the boat. He clicked on a link that took him to yacht sales. One could choose to search for boats by length, age, price, category and manufacturer.
A loose slat groaned. Hugh looked up. “Peace and love, brother,” said Kyle, snapping off a branch from the olive tree and scratching his neck with it. “Just want to give you some news. Your friend was looking for you.”
“A friend? Driving a Camaro?”
“El Camino, candy-color. But he wasn’t driving. Shotgun.”
“Long hair, Asian?”
“His-pan-ic. You know, the banger. Kid you gave a ride to down the beach.”
“Aaron,” muttered Hugh. “He’s not a—”
“Came into the café and asked for Mr. Mcpherson.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Did he say why?”
“Just wanted to know if you came here.”
“What did you tell him.”
“Said you were here just about every day.”
“Was there anyone with him?”
“Yeah, the one driving. Another banger. Big tattoo around his neck.”
“A girl?”
“Yeah, she was squeezed in there.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“No prob-lem.” Kyle licked his finger and spit. “When you see Hanna, tell her I want to talk to her, huh? Tell her I’m sorry. Will you do that?”
“Yeah. If I see her.”
“That’s what I meant,” said Kyle, smiling.
Hugh dropped his eyes to the screen, yet he could not avoid watching the hovering Kyle, who obtained a pack of cigarettes, noisily sucked one out and let it dangle from his mouth. With a grunt, he dug a neon-colored lighter from his pocket, lit up and puffed vigorously. Blowing out a delicate smoke ring, he nodded, turned and walked toward the parking lot, where he stopped, glanced back at Hugh and then smirked at his invisible friend. Waiting until Kyle got into his old Sentra and chugged onto the boulevard, Hugh returned to Google.
Ten thousand images of yachts awaited his perusal.
Chapter 19
Under a brisk wind, a plume of smoke danced above the ravine where he lived, but the smoke quickly dissipated and Hugh was not concerned.
But as th
e paved road turned to dirt and potholes, the flames became visible. Hugh floored the gas pedal, racing up the last one hundred yards and tumbled out of the car leaving the door open. A line of flames danced along one eave of his house, and gray smoke seeped from the front door and windows. He ran to the spigot, unhooked the coiled hose and turned on the water. The hose thickened and squirmed. Opening the brass nozzle, he played the jet stream over the roof. He blasted the flames along the eave, which erupted in a white cloud. There was a loud crack like a splintered bat.
Hanna’s rooster, wings afire, sat embedded in a wreath of glass shards. It’s dreadful black eyes settled on Hugh’s as the flames spread around its neck, flashing on the glass shard penetrating its throat.
“Hanna!”
Hugh drew out his keychain, found the house key. Stepping forward, he sprayed the front door. The water sizzled on the hot wood and spattered his face. He aimed at the doorknob for a few seconds and then inserted the key. He grabbed the doorknob, twisted and kicked the door. Dense white smoke hung slovenly in the doorway.
“Hanna!”
He shuffled blindly across the room until he collided with the ottoman. He fell forward, fingers groping the couch. His hand slipped beneath a warm wet cushion.
Flames sprung from the bookcase like headlights in the fog. He dropped to his haunches, spraying upward and burying his face in the stink of burned hair as he duck-walked toward the bedroom. He got two yards before the hose tightened. He yanked once, twice. He retreated and snapped, hoping it had just snagged a chair leg. He heard the fowl’s skin pop and smelled the obscene mouthwatering odor. He snapped the hose again and felt it loosen but remain weighted. Dragging the reluctant hose, he crawled down the hall.
“Hanna!”
In the bedroom, the smoke was thin, there were no flames and the bed was empty.
A deep low sound rose to a wail.
By the time, he’d backed out of the house, a half-dozen fire trucks had roared up and numerous firemen in bunker gear were rolling out their hoses. A half-dozen silver streams slapped down the flames. Water poured off the roof. Hugh soon stood in a puddle, muddy water slopping at his ankles.
As the firefighters doused the blaze, others had gone inside and were throwing out smoldering furnishings. The fringed tasseled ottoman tumbled into the now muddy backyard, plastic fringes curled up into themselves like tiny fists. Books and magazines, smoky tendrils rising from blackened pages, lay in a heap. Hugh bent down before the pile, sorted through the damage. He pulled Deadpan All The Way from the bottom. The glossy dust jacket was a breath away from turning into ash, the back and spine were scorched, interior threads showing through, but the front cover was intact. Hugh peeled away the jacket and ran his thumb across the burned spots.
Not more than a quarter hour had passed when a voice summoned Hugh into the house.
Hugh was surprised to see that aside from the bookcase and furnishings not much had been consumed by the flames. Some of the wooden floor was scorched and the ceiling blackened, but the structure looked intact.
Two firefighters were examining the north window in the living room. “Do you normally keep this window open?” asked one of the men.
“Yes. A couple of inches.”
“You see the screen.”
“Yeah.”
“Was it ripped like that?”
The firefighter pointed to the floor where a dark streak ran across the hardwood, ending at a stack of half-burned newspapers. “Looks like somebody ripped the screen, played a little lighter fluid over your hardwood and tossed in a match.”
Hugh recalled Kyle’s neon-colored lighter.
“You had any problems with neighbors lately?” asked the cop. Hugh noted the policeman’s nametag: Escher. He had a wad of cotton on his freshly shaven throat. Hugh thought of Kyle’s smirk. “No . . .”
“Does anyone else live with you?”
“I live alone.”
“No guests?”
“There was a woman here the day before, but she . . . left.”
“Did you have an argument with her?” asked Escher, pressing the cotton ball, which exuded a red spot.
“No. She wouldn’t have done this.”
“Not on purpose?”
“No.”
“By accident?”
Hugh glanced at the broken screen. “She was here when I left. She wouldn’t have to—”
“No, that’s right,” said Escher. “What’s her name?”
“Hanna.”
“Last name?”
Hugh shook his head.
“But you know her?”
“I don’t know her last name.”
“Local . . . ?” he asked insinuatingly.
“Yes, if you mean from the canyon.”
“What’s her address?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I met her down at the beach.”
“So you just invited her for the night.”
Another cop entered. He was carrying something. He took Escher outside. The two came back a moment later.
Escher asked, “How old was Hanna?”
“What’s going on?”
“Take it easy. How old?”
“Twenty-five, twenty-six . . . I don’t know.”
“How old are you?”
“What does that matter?”
“Fifty?”
“Forty-nine.”
“Is this Hanna?”
Escher held out a clear plastic bag that held a photo of a young woman. It sucked the air from Hugh’s lungs. It was Anna.
“Where did that come from?” Hugh finally managed to ask.
“Found it in your car. Your door was open, windows rolled down. Maybe it blew in from Chatsworth.”
“Like hell,” said Hugh. “That was not in my car.”
“This isn’t the girl that stayed with you.”
He dredged up a monosyllable. “No.”
“You’re certain?”
“Ab—absolutely.”
“Absolutely. Okay. Sounds firm. Hanna was twenty—”
“Twenty-five or twenty-six, maybe a year or two older.”
“So, older than this girl.”
“Considerably.”
“This girl looks fourteen or fifteen.”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen this photo before.”
Hugh glanced at the slim, provocatively posed, naked body. “No.”
“But you know this girl?”
“She’s . . . a student,” said Hugh, his heart in his throat.
“Your student?”
“She was in one of my classes in the spring semester. She graduated.”
“Was this the girl that was here?”
“No.”
“That was Anna?”
“Hanna.”
“The thirty-year-old.”
“I think I need a lawyer.”
“We just want to get things straight. Anna, Hanna. It’s confusing. This is a photo of—”
“Anna.”
“Anna? Got a last name?”
“I don’t . . .” but he did. “Mendez. Anna Mendez. She was a student in one of my classes.”
“Did you know her outside of school?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’d seen her at the beach. I was swimming at Topanga. She was there the other day with another student.”
“Another young woman?”
“No. A boy. Aaron.”
“How long ago was that?”
Hugh thought. “Three days ago. Look. They were hitchhiking. I gave them a ride home. She had a purse. It must have fallen out of her purse.”
“The photo?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t take it? She didn’t pose for you.”
“Of course not. What the fuck do you think—”
“Take it easy,” said the cop.
“I gave them a ride and it must have fallen out of her bag. She was putting on her dress . . .”
One
of the firefighters laughed.
Hugh glared at the man. “She was coming back from the beach,” he said in a rush. “She was putting the dress over her bathing suit.”
Escher snatched off the cotton ball and tossed it. “Where did you take them?”
“Van Nuys.” No. Studio City. But he did not correct himself.
“So the picture may have been left in your car accidentally?”
“That must be how it happened.”
“When did your relationship with her begin?” The fire trucks cut their engines. The rearrangement of his furniture ceased. The voices quieted. They had been transported into outer space. Vast and still and silent.
“I was her teacher.”
The firemen had disappeared. It was just Hugh and the cops.
Oh, Jesus. From a quarter mile distant, a blue grass band that practiced twice a week tuned up their banjos. He had tried to kill himself, he thought, which should take the edge off anything anyone else would want to do to him, but he felt weak anticipating the whirlwind of accusations.
“I’m not speaking without a lawyer.”
“We haven’t charged you with anything,” the second cop said.
“It must have been the boy who took the photograph.”
“Hanna’s friend?” asked Escher.
“Yes, no. Anna’s friend. Aaron.”
“Have you ever been charged with anything of a sexual nature?”
“No, no fucking way.”
“Anything with children?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Child endangerment perhaps?” asked the second cop, smiling slyly.
Hugh looked away, shook his head.
“Do you have a family?”
“I—no, I don’t.” Would it have been better to say, “I did, but now I don’t”?
“You shouldn’t go too far until we clear this up. We’ll need to do a formal inspection of your house, but other than the living room, there doesn’t appear to be much damage. You can probably get back in a day or two. Will you be staying with anyone, a friend?”
“I have—no. I’ll get a room.” They stared as if waiting for him to make the reservation in front of them.
Hugh watched Escher walk to the Volvo and open the door. The interior light revealed a woman’s face. The uniformed officer glanced at Hugh through the rear windshield. Her eyes were as yellow as a cat’s.